BioBuilder Career Conversation: Laura Aguilar Transcript

Sounds good. I do have some slides I can share. Yes, that would be helpful. And I have some extra slides in the back we can go through if we have time or we don’t have to, but I had them so I figured it was worth throwing them in. Let’s see here. Great Is that? Yes, I can see. For some reason, now I’m seeing, I’m not seeing the full. Oh, I know why. It’s because I have a second monitor. That’s what it’s being weird. Let’s see, there is better. I just turned it off. Okay, that still working, fine, yes, okay and let me see if I put this on.

This are just some fun pictures, since pictures make things more interesting. Um, I grew up in California on a farm and I originally wanted to be a veterinarian. I love science. I loved anything to do with animals helping sick animals, playing with animals, whatever I could find in that regard. So I went to college at University of California Davis, which is a school that’s well known for veterinary, for its veterinary school, and then during my undergraduate four years there I in preparation for hopefully going to vet school I ended up working in a lab to do some research, and that was something that was told I needed to do to get into school.

I’m not really thinking I would become a scientist and, surprisingly, I really liked it. I liked working in the lab. I was working with mice, but I wasn’t so much interested in, you know, the mice in terms of trying to heal them, but we were using them for research purposes and I started really appreciating more and more the needs of developing better medicines for diseases that could be used for for animals, but especially for people, which is, um, and I think maybe also during that time, my grandfather was very close to, had a heart attack, and so I kind of started to become a little bit more aware that, oh, people can. People can get sick, people you love can get sick, and and so through through that experience, I started thinking maybe actually medical school would be more interesting, and so I did a summer internship in a hospital to see if I would like that. I thought. I always thought I wanted to be outdoors all the time and wouldn’t like being in a hospital. But the world of seeing people who were sick being healed by doctors and nurses and all of the staff that helped them in that setting was really invigorating and thrilling to me.

So I ended up changing and applying to medical school instead. When I did that, one of the schools I applied to was actually in Texas, and that school had a special program called the MD PhD program, where you could get a combined medical school medical degree and a PhD in a in a science area, and it was funded by the government, and so it was eight, eight to 10 year long program and I just I had loved working in the lab and so I just said, okay, well, I’ll take it, that sounds great. So that’s what I ended up doing. So I had to move to Houston, which changes your whole life kind of when you do something like that where you’re moving somewhere where you have to be for at least eight years and I ended up being there for 13 years lab where we did a lot of genetic kind of molecular biology I guess I would say PCR, maybe something that you all are learning about and that type of thing. But I was focused on the path of learning about how the immune system works, so the system that helps you fight infection but also helps your body fight cancer. And so I did that. And then I also did the medical school part. After I finished both medical school and the PhD, I did my residency. So after medical school then usually you need to do a residency to specialize in some field, and I specialized in pediatrics to take care of kids, and then I further did a fellowship after that to specialize in pediatric cancer and after that I we we moved to so in the during that process.

So this man here in the middle with me and standing there with the lab notebook is my husband. We had met way back in the lab in California and he was getting his PhD in genetics at that time and, as you can see over there on the right. I just had a little bit about him because his story is really interesting. He grew up in Guatemala and he moved to California when he was 12 and learned, had to learn English from like watching TV and you know, sitcoms and things like that Went through the public schools in California as a non-English speaking person. So very challenging, but he managed to thrive and he’s very intelligent that might help and he really loved math and science.

Ended up, after graduating from high school, went to college there in California in Bakersfield, where he was living at the time, and then he went back to Guatemala to go to medical school and after his father got sick with prostate cancer, he came back to the US to help his family and then ended up deciding to go do a PhD in genetics at UC Davis, where we met, and he has always been working on kind of studying the basis of cancer, how it happens, and then how to develop treatments for it that are using genetic tools like genetic engineering, gene therapy and then immunotherapy as well. Well, so he ended up coming to Baylor College of Medicine with me in Houston and then he had a laboratory there and did our research there and then we ended up we moved to Boston for positions at Harvard and a few years after we were, some of the work that we were doing particularly that he was doing in his lab in Houston, was starting to look really promising for cancer, including prostate cancer. But it really needed a company to take it kind of had gone as far as it could in the academic setting and needed a company, a biotech company, to really take it to the next step, and so we ended up starting that company. So he left and I stayed on for a few more years. Somebody had to make a living and support the family, and so we started the company, basically in our basement and eventually grew it to a company that we went public in 2021. So up there in the top right corner is the picture from NASDAQ of the company when we went public, and the company now is continuing to develop products for prostate cancer, brain cancer, pancreatic cancer and lung cancer. We both left the company a couple of years ago and are doing different things, including some projects in Mexico where we’re trying to help develop the skills there for people who develop their own medicines in Mexico and that could be translated to other countries in the area as well. I’m also chair of Young Women in Bio for Boston, so we’ve been doing some work with BioBuilder and others to try to help bring STEM opportunities to students in the greater Boston area, and I’m also serving on the board of a brain tumor association, working as a consultant and for different companies.

We have two kids that are super interesting, which might have to be a topic for another time. If you’re ever interested, I can recruit them. One of them, the oldest one, is 28, and she’s a PhD student at Harvard and is studying lions in Kenya, goes to Kenya, puts collars on lions and collects scat from the lions and does PCR analysis on the scat, or sequencing and to identify which lion was where and also what the lion has been eating, and also puts tags on livestock. She works with the local people and farmers and puts ear tags on livestock so that she can also track when the lions are interacting with the livestock to try to help understand how the conflict happens and then, with the hope that they can develop better ways to preserve both the lions and the livestock develop better ways to preserve both the lions and the livestock.

That’s how I did it. So funny story, that’s how we were having to do it. So we would be in the lab all night long because you had to right. So it’s a funny story because of that. And my husband was still in California, in the lab there, and so we were talking and he actually worked at the company where the guy who invented PCR was working originally.

So they were working on trying to develop at that company, working on developing an enzyme that would be able to, because the problem was you even had to add new enzyme every cycle because the enzyme was killed by the high temperature. So they were developing an enzyme that was not sensitive. I think they were using bacteria that was adapted to be able to survive at different temperatures, and that’s where they completed it, anyway. So he was very involved in all of that, and so he had the idea that we should try to develop a machine to be able to have the temperature change without you having to do that, and so he ended up making a machine out of like parts from a washing machine or something like that in a water bath, and so he ended up developing this and it was working so well.

He shipped all the parts over to houston for. And then we, he came over and set it up there and so everybody was coming around looking at this machine that now you didn’t have to do it by hand. And then it was only I don’t know six months or a year later that there were companies that developed machines that were better at it. But we at least got, we got. We were ahead of the game yeah, it’s great um, do people have questions?

Let um, some of the classes overlap, so like my medical school classes helped, counted towards some of my graduate school coursework and um, and then I I think the medical school was even slightly short, shortened by the fact that, like some medical students have some blocks where they’ll go and do research. But I’d already done research as a PhD, so there are ways to make it work well. And the other thing that I think is important is funding is important. So, like my daughter, who’s doing her PhD right now, studying Lions, hers is a six year, you know at least six years, but she’s funded for six years. So it’s a graduate student stipend but it’s not bad, it’s livable. And I think the most important thing is to enjoy what you’re doing along the way, not be just doing something to get to a goal and hating it along the way. If you like what you’re doing, then the time isn’t, it isn’t so, so draining it’s very true, it’s a long-term commitment right and you and you have to still have a balanced life along the way.

Yeah, I’ll just pop through them and then we can do it quickly. Let’s see now. Thank you, there we go. So this was just something. Um, we gave a presentation to a high school up in Lawrence and they wanted us to talk about what is biotech and things like that, so I thought it might be interesting to you all. Um, yeah, so just, you probably have already talked about this, but I thought it was kind of useful to break down the word you know when you hear new words. So biotech or bio is just short for biotechnology and this just comes from the word bio, meaning living and studying living things, and technology is just using knowledge to make new things. So that’s what we do in biotechnology, where it can apply to anything from making vaccines, drugs, things to diagnose, like tests for viruses, like COVID, but even for cosmetics, for food studies.

As veterinary, things like that and there’s a lot of different jobs in biotech everything from doing the research, working in the lab, but there’s also things like sales and the manufacturing side and the medical side, and um training and managing people and information technology all of that. So there’s a lot of different pieces that go into it and boston is the number one um area for biotech in the united states, so this is the hub greater boston area, not just boston but the whole greater boston area, so there’s it’s a really great place to be.

If you’re interested in this, this just shows the timeline of how our prostate cancer product that we worked on went all the way from being in the mice to going in the human. This is a picture of the office in our basement to being on on wall street. This just shows you that you know, even things like viruses that we think are bad, causing things like covid, can also be used for good. And one of the ways that that happens is they can be used kind of like a car or airplane, you know, can transport things, so they can be genetically engineered to carry a different gene of interest into human cells to try to fix a genetic defect or to add something that would be useful, like to treat cancer. And one of the areas which this has been done is in herpes virus in a kid with a brain tumor, and the idea there is for the virus can actually kind of kill some of the tumor cells and also stimulate the immune response to come in and help clear out the cancer. And this is just an example of how there are many different jobs. Like I was saying before, this is just another visual way of showing it that there’s many different ways that you can apply PCR or all the different things that you’re going to be learning or that you have been learning at bio builder, to um, to the world of um, of health field, health related fields.